A Common Chord : They were a dying breed of men who nonetheless died early, shot to death as they slept. Police called them transients, but the killings have touched a nerve in Bell, where the five had been known for years.

When the news came out last week that five men had been shot to death in the quiet little city of Bell since December, the Sheriff’s Department called the victims “transients.”

Old-timers around Bell knew better.

Even the mayor knew Eric Ford, though they had never spoken. Ford was the old man who had slept under the cedar tree in front of City Hall for as long as anybody could remember. There’s a bare spot the size of a single bed on the ground where he slept.

Then there was “Big Jack” Horn, and “Little Dennis the Menace” Lynch, and James “Leftenant” Stout, and another old-timer, Rudy Wallace.

“They weren’t transients,” said Sue Goho, who has known most of them for more than a decade. “They were part of a clique, a community. They knew each other. And now somebody’s killing them off. It’s strange. And sad. Very sad.”

Except for Ford, who was quietly crazy, they were drinking men. They had sat next to each other literally for years at the last two old-timers’ bars in town, Casey’s and Dale’s. Each had lived from month to month on Social Security or disability checks that provided enough money for rent and for booze, but usually not both.

When push came to shove, they chose booze.

News of the murders has filtered out slowly in this 3-square-mile city southeast of Los Angeles, where cars can be seen sporting bumper stickers that read “Bell Is Swell.” But the murders have touched a nerve, particularly in old-time residents.

Bell, a city of 30,000 people, has changed around the old-timers. Many of their neighbors have moved away, or died. Those who remain are mostly young. Eighty per cent are Latino.

These old men were a dying breed who nonetheless died early, shot to death, apparently as they slept. All the murders occurred virtually within earshot of the Police Department, putting five fresh homicides onto police blotters that had recorded only three others in all of 1987.

Casey’s is one of those old neighborhood bars where the wood is worn from the beer glasses that have slid across it for 50 years.

Kelly Clancey, 69, was sitting at the far end of the long bar with perhaps 20 men one afternoon last week, his hands around a bottle of beer that had lost its frost.

“I knew ‘em all,” he said. “I know a lot ain’t been killed yet too.”

Clancey himself has slept in an old station wagon on the streets of Bell for 3 1/2 years. A light sleeper, he wakes up another man who sleeps on the ground near him so he can get to work. Then, he said, he comes to Casey’s and stays from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m.

“Police have been out twice to talk to me, tell me to go to a Salvation Army shelter,” he said. “I told ‘em I never get bothered. Besides, that’s too far from my corner.”

He has lived near “his corner” in Bell since 1948. Then rents rose, pushed up in part, those at the bar say, by immigrants who crowd four families into a home.

“Little Dennis the Menace” Lynch always sat at the stool nearest the door. He chose that seat, they say, because sometimes he was so drunk he couldn’t make it

all the way inside. On April 7, they found his body in an abandoned hotel near Casey’s. At 46, he was the youngest of the victims.

“You couldn’t help but like Little Dennis,” bartender Ed Adair said. “He loved sports, horses, football. Anything that ran fast. He could tell you the fractions of a second that Land-O-Lucy ran at the track. . . . “

Like the others, Dennis had a vulnerable spot, something that had gone wrong somewhere in his life that only drink seemed to set right. He had been a steelworker once, his friends said. Then, a nerve problem affected his balance; he failed a physical, lost his job. Even when he wasn’t drinking, they said, he staggered.

Of all the dead, “Big Jack” Horn was the best known.

When news went around last week that there was a man with a big belly on a piece of cardboard near the tracks, everybody knew it had to be Horn.

“Every drinkin’ man in Bell knew Big Jack,” said Odell Abbott, who used to own Casey’s, and lives across from the tracks where three of the bodies, including Horn’s, were found. “I met Jack 25 years ago, at least. Jack used to be a tree-topper up in Oregon, a high climber.

“He wasn’t a transient. Neither were the others. They was people who was just down on their luck and crawled up into the bushes over there to sleep awhile.”

Horn had been sleeping in the oleander bushes along the tracks for eight days. For the previous four months, he had been renting a $350-a-month apartment a few blocks away.

Shortly before the April rent was due, his monthly checks, totaling $620, had not arrived. He stopped by the 5 O’Clock Club trying to cash a check--for $10 on an empty bank account.

Old-timers don’t drink much at the 5 O’Clock anymore. The television plays movies in Spanish. The bartender speaks Spanish. And on Friday nights, a loud salsa-rock band plays songs they don’t understand.

“Jack, he was muy nice,” the woman bartender said. Pointing to a notice above the bar, she told Horn that she couldn’t cash his check. “Not this time, amigo, “ a fellow drinker at the bar told him. “I ain’t got it.”

Horn also stopped next door, where he had long lived with his step-grandson, Fritz Althof, a warehouse manager. Althof said he told his grandfather he would buy him some food, but not give him money. Horn left.

For years, Horn and his friends used to drink in Althof’s small front yard. Althof had even built them a bench to sit on. Then, he said, he and his grandfather quarreled, and Horn moved out. The friends stayed on, Althof said, until he took out the bench and ordered them to leave.

When his rent was due, Horn told the manager he was leaving and got permission to stay an extra night. Then, on April 2, he knocked on the door of neighbor Sue Goho.

‘I’ve Lived in the Woods’

“I’m going to the railroad tracks,” Goho said he told her. “I told him, ‘Jack, you’re too old, you’ll get killed out there.’ And he said, ‘I’m an old lumberjack, I’ve lived in the woods.’ ”

Horn was so big, she said, that he had never really been picked on, never known what it was like to be a victim of anything except loneliness and maybe his own weakness for drink.

Goho met Horn and the others years ago at what they called “the slave market,” a cluster of temporary job agencies that pay mostly minimum wage for day labor in factories and warehouses. Most important to the men, they were paid at the end of every day.

“We’d sit at Minuteman (a temporary help agency) and pass the jug while we were waiting to get called for jobs,” she recalled. “If you didn’t get a job after a while, you’d tell them, ‘Call me at the office if something comes up.’ And they’d know to call you up at Dale’s,” the other old-timers’ bar in Bell.

When Althof learned that his grandfather had died, he bought a half-pint of Kessler “Smooth as Silk” whiskey in Horn’s honor.

“He always bought it in half-pints,” Althof said. “Said he was afraid to buy a big bottle because he thought he’d get too drunk.”

Last Sunday morning, a friend, Kenny Chipman, went up to the tracks to find Horn. Instead, he found yellow police tape around a body.

“Jack was supposed to move in with me Sunday,” he said. “I went looking for him. Then I saw the body. Couldn’t mistake that ball head and that belly for anybody but Jack.”

Another victim, Rudy Wallace, 57, was found less than 60 feet away.

The last address anyone had for him was a trailer. But mostly he drank at Dale’s.

“I worked with him nine months once,” Carroll Robbins said. “Short dude, nice guy. He was an alcoholic. Wine, mostly. . . . I came in today thinkin’ maybe I’d look ol’ Rudy up. And here somebody killed him. Can’t understand why anybody wanna kill old Rudy.”

Two other men also were shot along the tracks. The body of James Stout, 51, was found Dec. 21. He, too, drank at Dale’s.

“Leftenant” Stout, a friend, Clifford Worthen, called him.

“I worked with him at Minuteman,” Worthen said. “He’d get drunk and always brag about something he did during the war. He was never too specific about what he did. So I’d salute him and call him, ‘Leftenant.’ ”

Stout lived with his mother until she died a few years ago, Worthen said. Then he moved out and nobody knew exactly where he lived. Worthen hadn’t even heard he was dead.

The fourth man shot along the tracks is still alive. He was known only as “Popeye.”

Sgt. Bill Talbot of the Bell-Cudahy Police Department talked to Popeye after he was shot.

“He didn’t see anything, didn’t know what hit him, just said a bullet hit him,” Talbot said.

The bullet is still in his neck, Talbot said. No one knows if it matches any of those found in the five dead men. Neither Talbot nor Sheriff’s investigators would give any such details of the case.

Moving to Skid Row

After the shooting, word went around Casey’s that Popeye was dead. Then “Indian Bob” McKenzie met him on the street one day and brought him in to tell everybody that he was just moving up to Skid Row, bullet and all.

Eric Ford, who was killed March 14, was an exception to the group. He didn’t drink. And he had a permanent home: the lawn in front of the neat, one-story, red brick complex that is City Hall.

“Just a stone’s throw from the Police Department,” said Talbot. “I talked to him a lot. He wasn’t a drinker. He wasn’t a derelict. He was just perfectly happy sleeping under the stars. He just seemed like a nice man without a home.”

“That old man, he never bothered nobody,” said “Babe” Macias, who takes care of the grounds at City Hall.

When Macias arrived for work at 6:30 a.m., the old man with the white beard would roll up his blanket and walk down Gage Avenue, stopping for a cup of coffee at a law office and maybe a hot dog at Jim’s Burgers. He never asked for food, but he was, as several people called him, “a polite transient,” and people gave food and money anyway.

Sam Apodaca, who lives above the Luv-Ly Pies shop across the street from City Hall, gave him Thanksgiving dinners. The next day, the old man in the white beard would bring him back the plate--washed.

Doing His Duty

“I offered him a place to stay, too,” Apodaca said. “But he told me he was in the British Navy and he was doing street duty for the Navy.”

Last thing Apodaca saw out his window across from City Hall on March 13 was the old man in his usual spot. When they found his body the next morning, there was a British passport. Apodaca, a light sleeper, never heard the shot.

One afternoon last week, a young transient named Curtis sat a few feet away from Ford’s bare spot. He said that once he had lived on the street in Bell for three months. He estimated that there were 50, maybe 100 other homeless men in Bell. Police estimated a dozen, maybe two.

“Nobody’s going to mourn that old man’s death,” Curtis said of Ford. “People get killed on the street. Another man bites the dust, makes room for somebody else. When you live out here . . . you take care of your own ass. And if you can’t, it’s adios. “

He didn’t know those killed along the tracks. “Must’ve been newcomers to the street,” he speculated, young and hardened. “Guys like me know better.”

Theories about the killer are passed like cigarettes up and down the bar at Casey’s and Dale’s. No one knows which, if any, is right. None of the men at the bar expect to be the next victim. But many admit that they themselves are much like the victims. “The same,” one old drinker said.

Some, but not all, are taking precautions. Eight men who used to sleep in the dumpster behind Dale’s have left. A man who beds down in an alley has a pit bulldog chained next to him, the gift of a woman who raises them. Clancey sleeps with a tire iron in his car.

Asked in an interview whether any emergency action was needed to protect the transients of Bell, Mayor Jay B. Price, who has been on the City Council for 30 years, said the killings would be discussed at the next council meeting. But, he asserted, there are no “truly Bell transients.”

“It (the series of killings) does not involve, let’s say, citizens of the community,” he said. “How are you going to prove, when these men live like that, that they are Bell residents?”